Club Car: Shaping tomorrow’s mobility - where will it take us?

“You may wonder what kind of vehicle is next for Club Car, but the answer is that the future is here, the future is now.”

Known for its brand of gold carts, Club Car is at the forefront of electric vehicle innovation, reinventing utility vehicles that work just about anywhere you can think of. They're all about designing vehicles that are fun, practical and of course eco-friendly, and you can spot their rides zooming around golf courses, resorts, farms and even college campuses.

In this episode, we meet Dan Dykstra, who takes us on an immersive tour with the CRU, allowing us to experience first-hand the thrill of cruising around in this innovative vehicle. We delve into the versatility of the CRU, from leisurely backyard adventures to practical urban roaming. And we learn about Club Car’s dedication to electric vehicles for sustainability.

We also hear from Brian Thompson, who heads up PTC’s CAD division - he explains the importance of Simulation Live and how important it is for Club Car.

Find out more about Club Car here.

Find out more about Simulation Live here.

Your host is Paul Haimes from industrial software company PTC.

Episodes are released bi-weekly. Follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter for updates.

This is an 18Sixty production for PTC. Executive producer is Jacqui Cook. Sound design and editing by Rema Mukena and Clarissa Maycock. Location recording by Tristan Mcneil. And music by Rowan Bishop.

Transcript

Welcome to Third Angle, where we're cruising in a golf cart to explore the future of mobility.

I'm your host, Paul Hames from industrial software company PTC. In this podcast, we share the moments where digital transforms physical and meet the brilliant minds behind some of the most innovative products around the world, each powered by PTC technology. The humble golf cart has come a long way in the last 60 years.

You're just as likely to find them off the golf course as you are on it. In this episode, we set off on a local adventure with The CRU, Club Car's latest innovation designed to transform the way you get around. With panoramic views, The CRU allows you to roam around freely enjoying some head turning design features.

Dan Dykstra, Customer Portfolio Leader at Club Car, gave our producer, Tristan McNeill, a ride in A CRU and a rundown of its features. He also shares the origins of Club Car, what's on the horizon for their future, and how the Kansas City Chiefs ended up with a whole fleet of them.

All right, right now we are standing on the worldwide campus of Club Car right here in Augusta, Georgia. This is the onward tent where we store a lot of our consumer vehicles before they ship. So that we can protect them from the elements and make sure that they're in the best possible condition when they ship to our dealers.

The primary focus of the business was fleet golf. Over time, we also began to see the opportunity for these small wheeled vehicles and specifically variation of the fleet golf car to be used in neighbourhoods for consumer vehicles. People use them for driving around the neighbourhood. It's a fun, fast, easy way to get around your neighbourhood, whether you're going to the neighbourhood pool or to potentially a neighbourhood country club.

Right now we're driving on the Club Car campus, our worldwide headquarters, we have approximately two or 300 Club Car vehicles around us as we're driving through the Club Car vehicle yard, we're driving in a Club Car CRU. We're sitting in the back seat in the lounge area. Of course we have our seatbelts on open air.

It's a beautiful day. Above us. We can see the blue sky even through our tinted see through roof. Just perfectly experienced a beautiful day in a fun vehicle.

It is an open vehicle. When you sit in it, It's got a very innovative seating setup. The front seats can actually allow you to face forward or when you're stopped and you want to hang out with the rest of the people you're driving with, they can be flipped around and face forward so that everybody can be sitting and talking around actually a table that we have in the vehicle.

The back of the vehicle is configured in what we call a lounge system. It's very much like a pontoon boat. You would, uh, see a pontoon boat where you could sit around in a semi-circular fashion. All six people have seat belts in this vehicle. When we, when we get to where we're going, a lot of the times we will hear from feedback that this is my chair when I get there.

Wherever it is you're going, whether you're going to your, uh, neighbourhood, uh, July 4th party, or going over to the country club by the neighbourhood pool, a lot of times. People will hang out in the vehicle, have lunch, and just socialize. So this is the way that the vehicle is designed. With a simple pull of the handle and pull the seat back, you can easily get it all set up to face the rear.

Right here we are looking at a beautiful six passenger LSV. The Club Car CRU was actually spelled C R U. People ask us a lot. What does that mean? Is it an acronym? No, it's not an acronym. It's just a really cool name for a vehicle that's different. We like to think about all of us being able to drive in the CRU around our neighbourhood with our CRU or our family.

It's designed to be driven around your neighbourhood, but also outside of your neighbourhood. We see that low speed vehicles are used about a 3 to 6 mile radius from a person's home, whether it's inside or outside of the neighbourhood. A low speed vehicle is It's a street legal vehicle that is light, gets a license plate just like your regular automobile.

It can be driven on roads that are 35 miles an hour or less, and can cross roads that are 45 miles an hour on their speed limit.

From an innovation perspective, Club Car is always looking. At the best opportunity to be more efficient and to get the best possible product out to our customers. We do offer both gas and diesel vehicles, but the large majority of what we manufacture, and it's been this way for decades actually, is electric vehicles.

We're approximately 70 percent electric and we have been, as I mentioned, for decades. Over the years, the technology of these electric powertrains has changed. It used to be that the electric powertrain was a DC motor with a flooded lead acid battery. As you go through the years, you eventually go to AC motors and lithium batteries because it gives you the opportunity to have really good performance and really good efficiency.

So efficiency is very important to us and very important to our customers. We're constantly trying to make sure that the vehicle costs you less to maintain that vehicle or total cost of ownership. So we do take into account. The total amount of electricity and electrical cost that it would take to maintain a fleet of these vehicles, or even on the consumer side to have one vehicle that you use as your family vehicle.

So I've been at Club Car for 16 years now. Over that time, I've worked in engineering. Uh, in the beginning of my career here, I was a design engineer for a number of years, eventually got the opportunity to move into engineering management. And from there, I got the opportunity to work specifically on innovation for a number of years.

Partnered with the vice president of engineering and we're specifically looking into really innovative things like autonomous cars and next generation powertrains.

If I could design a Club Car vehicle specifically for myself, my fantasy vehicle, it is the Club Car CRU. My wife and I have four children. We're a family of six. This vehicle is perfect for us to drive around our community, to take it outside of the community, to go to our restaurants, our grocery stores.

It allows us to replace our large suburban, which is a gas vehicle and the majority of the trips that we take in around our community. Can 100 percent be replaced.

The Club Car product development process is very focused on the end use case of the vehicle that we're developing. So if we're developing a fleet golf car, we are going to go out and we are going to work with golfers. We're going to work with golf course superintendents. We're even gonna really dive into the golf car fleet

buying process so that we understand the decision makers in that process. But at the same time, we need to know from a dealer perspective, what are they seeing out in the market? What type of feedback are they learning that can help us create the absolute best possible product for all of our customers?

So throughout my 16 years at Club Car, I have seen a lot of unique and varying use cases for our vehicles. One of the most fun uses cases for our vehicle is when our custom solutions organization takes a vehicle and makes it for a specific order. I've seen our custom solutions team reconfigure our vehicles so that they can transport wheelchair bound people.

And this is a really, really good way to leverage the custom solutions group that we have. They can create anything for anyone. It's really interesting. I've seen some of our larger vehicles that are specifically made to be manoeuvrable in high density areas, but have large lifts on them to help service street lamps, as an example, that are 30 feet off of the ground.

There are definitely some celebrities that own our vehicles. One of the highest profile sightings recently, Patrick Mahomes of the Kansas City Chiefs. decided to gift all of his offensive linemen a brand new onward, uh, specifically Kansas City Chiefs red, beautiful vehicles. Uh, but there was a lot of social media that hit with all of those offensive linemen getting those brand new onward vehicles and driving around at the facility there in Kansas City.

Its role in a low carbon society is that it can replace the gas automobile that In the majority of the use cases that we see where people are driving their cars within a three to six mile radius of their home or of their neighbourhood. This vehicle as a low speed vehicle can replace 100 percent of those trips that are now being, uh, taken with gas vehicles.

In the future, I see high end people moving, uh, for example, transporting people around hotels, around resorts. We actually are seeing orders come in now for people that are buying the existing CRU for transporting around their master plan community as a part of the sales process. It's a high end people moving opportunity.

With the question of what type of vehicle is next for Club Car, the answer is that the future is here. The future is now. The Club Car Urban is just getting released. It is designed for last mile delivery. It's designed to replace large combustion engine vehicles with an electric vehicle for use in high density urban population areas.

So from a Club Car perspective, the future is now. We are specifically targeting on, on re replacing combustion engines on short duration trips with our small wheel electric vehicles.

That was Dan Dykstra from Club Car. And thanks to him, we were lucky enough to hear all about innovation at Club Car and how the CRU is changing the way people are getting around. Now it's time to meet our expert, Brian Thompson from PTC. Brian, as we've heard, Clubcar is investing in the growth that comes from customers interest in new and enhanced products, such as the CRU.

But with that comes the need for innovative ways to address that growing demand quickly and efficiently. And this is where PTC's Creo Simulation Live plays a hand. Are you able to give a high level overview of what Simulation Live is, and how Club Car benefit from it? 

Creo Simulation Live is an integration of some new technology developed by our partners at Ansys that allows design engineers to gain insights into the performance of their designs as they develop their design. Now that might sound like traditional integrated simulation in CAD. And this is actually much, much more than that because the technology in and of itself, combined with the way it's integrated into Creo makes it particularly easy for design engineers to make use of it.

Design engineers don't need to be meshing experts. They have to just understand the basic physics of what's required of their design and in doing so can implement the requirements for those basic physics into the design and get feedback immediately. It's very, very powerful, but more important than anything, it's very, very quick for a design engineer to get really, really good feedback.

So it, it's a foundation of the simulation strategy inside Creo, deeply ingrained in Creo, very fast, very easy to use. We love Club Car's, um, case study because they really do share the vision that we see more and more customers. Embracing frankly, uh, all across, uh, the market in multiple industries. And that is that, um, simulation is more and more important to the design process than it has ever been because customers can't waste time, uh, building expensive prototypes to just find out that a design's not working at the time they do testing.

They need to have confidence in the design as they go to production. And, um, what that's been doing is that's been overwhelming simulation departments. Uh, at really all of our customers that are using simulation as part of design, find this simulation departments are overwhelmed. And so what Club Car committed to that many other customers are committing to is shifting simulation to the left in the design process, earlier in the design process, and so Club Car has,

um, progressed significantly in that way and that they've... they've moved a bunch of the more basic simulation tasks that are really, really relevant in the design process to the design engineers, allowing their simulation experts in the simulation department to focus on more sophisticated simulation tasks that require their expertise.

But I would say at the highest level, if you're thinking about implementing simulation into your design process, you're looking for exactly what Club Car says in this great case study they got, which is they're getting the market faster with higher quality products. That's how I would summarize it in a nutshell.

Thanks to Brian for his perception, Dan Dykstra for giving us a ride around in the CRU, and Tristan for letting us take a sneak behind the curtains of Club Car. Please rate, review, and subscribe to our bi weekly, third angle episodes wherever you listen to your podcasts. and follow PTC on LinkedIn and X for future episodes.

This is an 18Sixty production for PTC. Executive producer is Jacqui Cook. Sound design and editing by Reva Mukenna and Clarissa Maycock. Location recording by Tristan McNeil and music by Rowan Bishop.